Canada’s attempt to make amends with its stolen children

It was 1936. She was eight years
old, a young Squamish girl living with her family in a small house on Marine
Drive in West Vancouver. One day a Catholic priest visited her home and saw
young Marjorie standing behind her mother. “Who’s that?” the priest asked.
“That’s Marji, my daughter,” her mother responded.

“How come she’s not in school?”

Marjorie’s mother told the priest
that her daughter was very sick and would be better served by staying at home.
He was unmoved, telling her that both she and her daughter would go to jail if
Marjorie didn’t go to school.

Her mother relented when she
learned that her daughter wouldn’t be too far off at St. Paul’s Indian
Residential School in North Vancouver, just a city away.

For Marjorie, however, that was
no consolation.

“They brought me there, this big
school there with a bunch of kids,” she says. “(The) first day I was so scared,
you know, I’d never been away from my mother.”

Over the next five years,
Marjorie became one of over 80,000 aboriginal kids that history would come to
know as “stolen children” — kids taken from their families by churches
and government and placed in residential schools where they would be
assimilated into Canadian society.

The Truth and Reconciliation
Commission

To date, the history of
residential schools has been rough at best, but Marjorie will soon have a
chance along with thousands of others to enter her story into Canadian history
as part of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) — the first of
its kind in Canada. It comes as part of the Indian Residential Schools
Settlement Agreement, which, with individual payouts to survivors that have
reached $30,000, is the biggest class action settlement in Canadian history.

The commission is a five-year,
$60-million project that began its work on June 1 and ultimately hopes to hold
events in seven Canadian cities. Overseen by a panel of three commissioners, it
has a number of objectives — chief among them is to give former students
and anyone else affected by residential schools a chance to share their
experiences either through truth sharing or statement-taking.

It is open to hearing from
numerous parties, including First Nations, Inuit or Métis former students, as
well as their families and communities. It also welcomes testimony from church
representatives and former school employees.

The commission’s work will
coincide with an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, to be made in the
House of Commons on June 11.